A pair of doors with 74 panels (AKA Fun With the Shaper)

I was recently contracted to build an unusual pair of doors. They were based on some doors my client had seen in Turkey that had an interesting pattern of small panels with beaded muntins between them. Building them involved a series of jigs, custom cutters and a bit of chin scratching. I wrote a blog post about how I worked my way through the process. If you’re interested you can check it out here.

Great work Scott. That is a lot of shaper work. I have to say that although I’ve had shapers for years and always love to see the flawless profiles that come off of them I can not honestly say that I’ve ever really considered using this particular tool as “fun”. ..... :-)

Question for you: How do you keep the stiles of the doors from bowing after finish milling? I’m thinking of building a pair of closet doors, and am concerned about bowing. Thanks!

—Dean

When I’m building doors I always rough mill my stock to within a quarter inch or so of final dimensions, sticker it and allow it to sit for a day or so. The rough milling generally releases any internal tensions that make the stock move. Then I go back and re-mill to final size. The parts usually stay flat then. These doors are 2 1/4” thick. Instead of making them from 12/4 (if I could’ve even found some) I laminated the parts from 2 layers of 6/4. That way any stresses that might be in one of the laminates are tempered by the second layer. This gives a really stable door. I don’t bother doing this with doors that are 1 3/4” or thinner.

Thanks for the info! That’s a good idea, about laminating the boards, where the natural tension in each of them cancel out. I do a rough mill, and then sticker for a day, then finish mill to final size. But sometimes (usually with pieces thinner than 1”) I get a little curve anyway. I was curious to your experience, and how you handle it.